safe house
106
4.8
- noun
- /seɪf haʊs/
:
casa segura
- The undercover agents took the informant to a safe house to protect her from danger.
Let's take this into a secure safe house right now.
- Let's take this into a secure safe house right now.
- All right, Blair, we're at the safe house.
- And their, their job was if the Soviet Union invaded, they would go to ground, hide out in their safe houses.
- We went into one safe house and he had poured himself a cup of tea and it was still hot, but we couldn't quite get him.
- So we're our little team house, our safe house was in that area.
- Second, I'm not sure where, but all hell broke loose and we had to from there go move into a safe house.
- The man who tortured him, I think he was doing the torturing in the safe house, which he was then killed, was revealed to be a ACIA asset.
- But yes, the, the, the people I worked with were fantastic and we never sat around in some safe house in some shit hole somewhere, you know, talking politics.
Examples
-
Later that night, Lucius left the safe house and took to the streets.
Fiction book (1992) -
And we'll need a safe house in which to do that.
Fiction book (2001) -
Well, from the time we got in country, we got to a safe house, which we moved several times.
-
You go back to the safe house.
-
I needed to go to ground, hit the safe house and make ready.
-
Find yourself a safe house or a relative close by.
-
We'll go to the safe house, refuel, then we'll get out of here.
-
The building I tailed him to was a safe house, a place that to them meant staying alive.
Fiction book (2002) -
The family endured a harrowing passage from their safe house to the coast, and then a stormy trip across the sound.
Academic text (1999) -
So when I get word that Jiang has been staying in a safe house in Barcelona, I see an opportunity for everyone lo transcend their circumstances.
Synonyms
108
3.9
A safe place where people or animals are protected from danger
70
4.1
A safe place where people go to escape danger
57
2.5
A secret place where nobody can find a person or thing
55
4.0
A secret place where someone stays to avoid being found
25
5.1
A private place where someone goes to be alone
2
3.9
A place or situation that protects people from danger
A protected place where people hide to be safe from attack
How Safe
Surface Forms
Morphology
The meaning is directly compositional: 'safe' modifies 'house' to indicate a dwelling that provides protection or refuge, so a learner who knows both words can infer it denotes a house used to keep people safe. This adjective+noun pattern is common cross‑linguistically and follows standard English composition, making the expression immediately comprehensible to B1 learners.
Etymology
Safe house comes from the simple idea of a safe place and a house where people could hide. These houses were often kept secret and used to protect people in danger, so the phrase means 'a hiding place or refuge'.